The dry grass of the veldt, which is always catching fire, was burning between us and the Boers; long lines of low smouldering fire, eating their way slowly along, and sending volumes of smoke drifting downward, obscuring the view.

The Rand gold fields are a stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but I was not a stranger to gold-mining; the veldt was a noble thing to see, but it was only another and lovelier variety of our Great Plains; the natives were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new; and as for the towns, I could find my way without a guide through the most of them because I had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like them in other lands; but the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a splendid and absorbing novelty.